


We'll Have to Muddle Through Somehow

by scioscribe



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Bonding, Christmas, Christmas Presents, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-20 23:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Danny invites Ward over for Christmas.  The Rand-Wing-Meachum holiday traditions may need a little fine-tuning.





	We'll Have to Muddle Through Somehow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



Ward doesn’t know how to do this stuff.  Like, he _really_ doesn’t know.

This could actually be his real life rock-bottom.  Never mind restraints on his wrists and ankles and cold sweat all over him stinging like a rash, never mind lugging the dead weight of Harold’s body out to the lake, never mind Joy turning her back on him and Danny almost _dying_.  He is thirty-one years old and he doesn’t know how to buy a Christmas present.

He never had anybody but Joy and Harold.  Never.  And they weren’t that kind of family, not even before everything went to hell.

He and Joy used to have dinner together on Christmas Eve.  _Price fixe_ menus and Dom Perignon and then, like they had to prove they had an ounce of personality, peppermint ice cream from this creamery in a converted barn that looked like something out of a _Better Homes and Garden_ spread.

The ice cream was pink and green and white and the guy who dished it out for them always crisscrossed their scoops with this waffled hot fudge design.  And Ward could tell from the way this guy did it, this guy his age with these sleeve tattoos and this Bronx accent—he thought it was kind of a big deal.  This guy who had been there six Christmas Eves out of six, this guy whose life was clearly going nowhere: he looked like the world was made out of sunshine and puppies.  It always sort of pissed Ward off.

Guess he won’t be seeing him this year.  Joy’s not returning any of his calls.

So no dinner, no champagne, no peppermint ice cream served up by Mr. Smiley.

Danny, being Danny, has invited Ward over for Christmas dinner.

“You know,” Ward said, “usually the dinner invitations get saved for people who _didn’t_ spend part of the calendar year trying to have you killed.  I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this to you.”

“Colleen’s going to make duck.”

“Right, that has nothing to do with anything.”

“Look, we both know you don’t have plans.”  Danny was hands-down the only person Ward knew who could point out that everybody knew his life was shit and have it not sound like he was being a dick about it.  Not that he would have thought that a couple of months ago.  “Come have dinner with us.  You don’t want to miss my first Christmas back in the States, do you?”

“Desperately.”

“No Christmas in K’un-Lun,” Danny said mournfully.

“That’s not gonna work on me, man.”

“And I thought—”  Danny hitched up an enormous sigh.  This shit wouldn’t pass in community theater in Middlefuck, Iowa.  “I thought now that I was finally home—after everything we went through—okay, is that really not going to work?  Because it’s hard to keep doing that voice and I don’t waste it if it’s not effective.  You know, conserve my strength.”

Ward laughed and then closed his eyes.  Sure.  Why not.

“Screw it.  What time?”

And so here he is, three days before Christmas, trying to figure out—well, relationships.  Friendship, family.

He’s about a minute away from calling Bethany, but he can already imagine how that talk would go.

Hi, Bethany.  No, I’m not thinking about using again, I just need some shopping advice on what to get my brother and his girlfriend for Christmas.  You know, the brother who spent fifteen years presumed dead, the one who learned kung fu and how to turn his hand into a superpowered night-light, the one I tried to have killed, the one I killed my dad for?  Well, killed my dad a second time for?  Yeah, him.  Oh, and something for his girlfriend, this woman I barely know.  Maybe a scented candle.

Yeah, that’s the kind of open and honest communication that will help him build—literally nothing.

Besides, he can do this on his own.  He should be able to do this on his own.  It’s just Christmas, and it’s not like he’s three ghosts away from being Ebenezer Scrooge.

He’s uncomfortably, compellingly aware of the fact that he _has_ an escape chute for all this.  More than one, even.  For starters, he could always just not show up.  It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been a disappointment and it sure as shit won’t be the last.  He has let Danny down on things that mattered more than whatever chestnut-roasting Currier and Ives trip he’s on now.  So if he doesn’t come through, then… that’s just who he is.

He doesn’t want that to just be who he is.

Escape chute number two: don’t care.  Don’t be a dick about it, but don’t care.  Pretend, for one night, that all of them are normal, that there are no special circumstances, no stakes.  Buy Colleen that scented candle, buy Danny a set of kung fu movies, bring them a bottle of wine, eat their roast beast, and go home.  Have himself a generic little Christmas.  Done.

And maybe that’s all he owes them or all he can reasonably expect from himself.  Certainly nothing in his life would suggest otherwise.

But he thinks about Danny coming to the cremation.  Danny showing up for that, for him, after everything.  Danny showing up at the penthouse when he had no sane reason to try to save any of them.

Ward wants—wants to show that he knows that matters.

And he tried to give Danny half the company, but Danny wouldn’t take it, so here he is, shopping for Christmas presents like he’s in a Hallmark movie.

He wishes Joy would talk to him again.  Joy’s good at this—hell, she could have arranged a Christmas organ donation.  He would never have been able to pull that off.

Realistically, though, he’s going to need a new liver before either Danny or Colleen will.  They probably drink green tea while meditating, shit like that.

And there’s another problem.  Even when he knows crap Danny likes, he doesn’t know enough about it to know what to get him for it.  And frankly, he doesn’t want to.  He gets enough serenity talk in NA.

The last time he really knew Danny, Danny was a snot-nosed kid and Ward _still_ didn’t really know him.  All the awful things Danny says he did back then—Ward doesn’t remember any of them.  Just this gnawing feeling in his chest as a kid whenever Danny was around.  Danny, who had everything, who was easy to like, easy to love.  In contrast to him.  He remembers the way that felt, both the clawing, empty pain of it and the worse and emptier cessation, when Danny was gone and Ward had to realize that he too had found Danny easy to love.  Nothing in any of that about Danny liking skateboarding or monster movies or even having a favorite color.  Nothing useful.

So what he has to work with— _all_ he has to work with—is now.

Yeah, he’s getting them both gift cards.

Then he has a thought—the same thing he’s been thinking all along, really, but turned now from a different angle: _This means a lot to Danny._ Exaggerated self-pity aside, Danny wasn’t lying to him.  _Doesn’t_ lie to him.

So they didn’t have Christmas in K’un-Lun, and now Danny wants it.  That’s something.

* * *

 

“Do you think he’ll show?” Colleen says.

Danny tries to make light of it.  “If he doesn’t, he’s seriously missing out.  Santa-shaped cookies, duck and barbecued pork, an actual Christmas tree—”

“Yeah, next year you might want to buy a tree for some other reason than feeling sorry for it,” she says, smiling.  “Every time I look at it, it’s drooped a little bit more.”

Next year, huh?  He likes that.  It’s a new kind of constancy, and he’s been short on that lately.  When he thinks about him and Colleen having another year together—taking for _granted_ that they’ll have another year together—something inside him relaxes.  In K’un-Lun, everything they did had been done that way for hundreds of years and even if he can’t keep on following their pattern, he still wants to find one of his own.  Maybe not as rigid—and maybe involving more, well, sex and cheeseburgers than Lei Kung would have wanted for him—but his.  Theirs.

And as far as he’s concerned, _they_ includes Ward and Joy.  And Davos, but… he thinks that will take longer.

Right now he’s hoping for Ward.

“Hey.”  Colleen puts her arm through his and leans briefly against his shoulder.  Danny turns his head to get the soft, beachy smell of her shampoo.  “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

She taps something lightly against his chest and when he looks down, she’s stuck a red gift bow on him.

He raises his eyebrows.  “I’m your present?”

“Mm-hm.  I’ll unwrap you later.”

He kisses her—chapstick and sugar cookie dough—and then the doorbell rings.

“Timing,” Colleen sighs.  “Talk to him about his timing.”  She gives him one final, firm kiss and pushes him off toward the door.

Ward’s wearing a black wool trenchcoat with snow matted around the collar and his eyes are red-rimmed, but he’s smiling—okay, it’s a tense smile, but still—and he’s carrying _a lot_ of boxes.

“I hope I wasn’t supposed to come wearing a reindeer sweater,” Ward says.

“I mean, I won’t say I’m not disappointed,” Danny says, grinning.  He gives Ward a hug, which goes as well as it ever does—Ward stiffens slightly at first, like he’s being mugged, and then relaxes enough to return it.  “Here, let me help you carry all this stuff in.  We can put it under the tree.”

“You have a tree?  Oh, Danny—that’s not a tree.”

“I’ve been trying to tell him that,” Colleen says, coming around the counter and drying her hands off on a dishtowel.  Danny can see her sizing up how she’s supposed to greet Ward—it’s the same look she gets right before she springs into motion when they spar—and she lands on sort of patting his arm.  “Hi, Ward.  Merry Christmas.  And yeah, it’s basically the Charlie Brown tree.”

“Oh, right,” Danny says, remembering.  He tilts his head.  “Okay, it kind of is.  But it has a lot of personality.”

“ _Right_ ,” Ward says.  He clearly finds this argument unconvincing.

Danny’s pretty sure both of them would concede that the tree looks better with all the presents crowded around underneath it, but he decides to just take that on faith.  Colleen takes in all of Ward’s boxes and a sudden smile crosses her face.

“Wow,” she says, “I can see the family resemblance, if you want to call it that.”  She gestures at the gifts.  “This is pretty much how Danny first got me takeout.  Waiters came in carrying silver dishes and tables with white tablecloths—”

“It was the only restaurant I knew!”

This more or less gets them through dinner.  Danny’s not an idiot, he can tell that Ward and Colleen aren’t finding much to talk about that’s not him, but he’ll take this, especially as a first step.  There’s no sense in pushing things right now.  If he’s gotten anything from sitcom holiday specials since he’s been back, it’s that a lot of people find the holidays stressful.  If they’re all having a good time together, that’s enough of a tradition to get them to next year.

_Next year all our troubles will be miles away…_

They sit around the table for a while eating the Santa sugar cookies and this sweet, bready, fruit-studded Italian cake Ward brought over along with a bottle of wine that he’s not drinking from, and then, for no particular reason, Ward apparently decides he’s hit the wall on Christmas cheer.  He says, “Well, this has been a great night, thank you both,” and it’s not so much the abruptness of it as the sudden paper-doll politeness that makes Danny worry about him a little.  Ward could be closing out a business meeting right now, with the way he sounds.  He’s gotten his guard back up about something and Danny doesn’t even know what.

He touches Ward’s elbow.  “Come on, stay to open your presents, at least.”

“And to see us work our way through the mountain of boxes you brought,” Colleen suggests.  “Seeing someone open a present is half the fun of giving it, right?”

Ward still has that fight-or-flight feel to him, but he says, “Right, yeah,” and stands there stiffly.

“Okay,” Colleen says, her voice deliberately mild, “I guess we’re done with dessert, then.”

Danny helps her carry the plates into the kitchen—“He’s not going to offer to help wash up, is he?” she whispers to him and Danny reluctantly has to shake his head because he really does doubt it, he’s not sure Ward has washed a dish in his life—and then they join Ward over by the tree.  Ward is looking down at the boxes like he would like them to spontaneously combust.

“I didn’t know what to get you,” Ward says.  “Christmas… it wasn’t really something we did.”

Colleen sizes this up before Danny does.  “Me neither, growing up.  Guess we make it up as we go.”

Ward hitches his chin up in a kind of half-nod.

“So we… open presents?” Danny says.  He recalibrates.  “We’re opening presents.”

“Here,” Ward says, shoving a box at him.

It’s on the lighter side, but nothing rattles when he moves it onto his knees to unwrap it.  The wrapping paper, he notices, is applied with the kind of fanatical neatness of hotel bed-sheets.  He pops some of the tape up with his thumb and starts to ask if Ward wrapped these himself and then just keeps on peeling off the paper.  He knows Ward didn’t—if Ward doesn’t do Christmas, he wouldn’t have the chops—but the moment is wrong to joke about it.  Ward’s center is, as always, completely off-balance, not that he’ll let Danny help him fix it.

He opens the box.  It startles a laugh out of him.

“What?” Colleen says, craning around to see.

He tilts it so she can.

It’s a row of carefully-packed DVDs: all the old Claymation ones they grew up with, _Rudolph_ and _Frosty_ , _The Nightmare Before Christmas, A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34 th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas_, and—

“ _Die Hard_?”

“It counts,” Ward says.  “Totally counts.”

The theme of Ward’s gift-giving quickly becomes clear.  Another box is full of candy canes, tins of fudge, and foil-wrapped dark chocolate oranges; another has the ugliest sweaters Danny has ever seen.  They’re not even reindeer sweaters, reindeer sweaters would have a little bit of dignity, probably, just because of the antlers; these are snowman sweaters.  With glitter.  The next box yields up a complete Christmas village.  Then stockings—two, one for Danny and one for Colleen, presumably, though Danny hopes they’ll need more.  That they’ll keep needing more.

“This is really nice,” Danny says.  There’s a little bit of a lump in his throat.  “Thank you, Ward.  It’s—it’s definitely like getting fifteen Christmases at once.”

Ward smiles.  It’s a warmer look than Danny’s used to seeing on him.  “I figured you had a deficit that could use correcting.”

So Danny sits there surrounded by the commercial ephemera of American Christmas, and then it’s time for Colleen to open her gifts, and—

Ward has bought Colleen a scented candle.

It is, apparently, a really expensive, really good-smelling scented candle, but it’s still a scented candle.

He follows this up with a scarf, a bottle of fancy perfume, and—actually slightly better—an antique-looking coffee mug with an elephant on it.  Why an elephant?  Danny has no idea.  But it’s at least a little distinctive and actually the elephant is kind of cute.

“Um,” he says, “next time you can just give the presents to both of us, you know?  Like one gift for two people.  I mean, Colleen just put her name on what I got for you.”

Colleen winces.  “You’re not really supposed to tell him that.”  She stands.  “I’m going to get started on the dishes, okay?  You two can have some quality time.  Set up the Christmas village or something.”

They do.  Ward fixes little magnetic feet to various points on the toy ice-skating rink and says, “I should have just asked you what she’d like.  I got tunnel-vision focusing on you, and then—I don’t know.  This isn’t really my area, Danny.  People.”

“You and Joy didn’t do Christmas presents?”

“Just dinner.  Out.”

“That’s it?”

Ward hesitates, and then he says, “And we’d get peppermint ice cream.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Well, it’s, what, another half hour till Christmas, so maybe she’ll change her mind and talk to me and we can do it again.”  He smacks another ice-skater into place.  “Before all this, the last time I bought an actual Christmas present was for Harold.”

“Before he…”

Ward shakes his head.  “After.  The first Christmas after he—came back.  I don’t know why I did it.  It wasn’t like things were all rainbows and father-son moments between us before he died, even, and they were only going to get worse, but I—it was so stupid.  I bought him this paperweight.  It’s the same kind of thing with Colleen, you know, you think, what do women like, what do dads like.  What would you get your dad if he was more like a dad and not…”

Danny just waits.  He got everything about Harold wrong before, he doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions this time around.

“And I gave it to him,” Ward says, swallowing, “and he looked at me like he had no idea what I was even thinking and then he said, ‘Ward, I already have a paperweight,’ like I was an idiot.  ‘Ward, you’ve been here so many times now, you’ve seen my desk, you should know that.’”  He pushes his hands back through his hair.  “I wanted to grab it back from him and smash his skull in with it.  Hey, turns out I could have and he would have just popped back up again.”

Danny says, “Like a Weeble.”

Ward laughs and then presses his fingertips to his forehead.  “Exactly.”

“The rest of your life, the people in it, Ward, they’re not like that.  We’re not.  Okay, yeah, Colleen is maybe a little pissed that you just got her these things that don’t really… have anything to do with her, but it’s okay.  It’s all okay.”

“That’s the message of the season, huh?  They teach you that in K’un-Lun?”

“No,” Danny says quietly.

“Yeah.  I’m an asshole.”  There’s an awkward pause.  Ward gives him a bag of fake flaky snow.  “Here, scatter this stuff around.  And tell me something about what you did up there when you were busy not having Christmas.”

Danny scatters the white flakes around—they look kind of like particularly bad dandruff—and it reminds him.  “Well, we still had plenty of snow.  So sometimes we’d go sledding, me and Davos.  We didn’t really have sleds, but we’d pry up sides of boxes or use serving platters, really anything we could find.  It’s not the greatest idea, going sledding on those mountains.  You tend to hit rocks.  Everybody was unpredictable about whether or not they’d ignore that we’d obviously been doing it, so sometimes we’d get punished and sometimes we wouldn’t.”

“Did you ever get better at avoiding the rocks?”

Danny shrugs.  “I don’t really think there was any way around them.”

Ward leans against him for a moment, a warm weight against his arm.  And later there’s the return of the red gift bow and there’s the new perfume on Colleen’s throat—“Might as well use it,” she says—and it’s all unforgettable, every minute of it, but he doesn’t forget this either.  Ward, his brother, and Christmas.  For the first time in a long time.

He gives Ward his Christmas present then, while Colleen’s still in the other room—since he already admitted she had nothing to do with it, he figures it’s fine to acknowledge that he’s the one who cares about Ward’s reaction.

It didn’t cost much.  Ward has enough money to buy whatever he wants, and if it costs enough, he’s probably already gotten it, just to tick it off some list.  But Danny’s pretty sure he doesn’t have this.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ward says when he gets the box open, but he’s smiling.

It’s a Zen office kit—a little sand garden with a tiny rake, a bonsai tree, and a really earnest, really inaccurate book about feng shui.

“Your office has terrible energy,” Danny says.

“Well,” Ward says, “thank God you’re here to help us fix the really important problems at the company,” and he touches one of the bonsai’s leaves very carefully, like he wants to make sure it won’t fall off, like he’s a little worried he might break it.


End file.
